🇧🇴 Bolivia · Valleys
Valle de la Concepción is the heart of Tarija's wine and singani route, in southern Bolivia. A short drive from the city of Tarija, this bright, mild valley holds much of the vineyard and winery land of the country's most important wine region, with plantings that rank among the highest in the world.
Known affectionately as 'la Concepción', the valley blends vineyard landscapes, historic and modern wineries, and quiet towns where wine and singani set the pace of life. It is the main stage of the Fiesta de la Vendimia (Fiesta de la Uva), which celebrates the harvest every year with tastings, music and tradition. Singani's denomination of origin is closely tied to these valleys.
This guide gathers the essentials of Valle de la Concepción: the wineries and the wine route, wine and singani tastings, the Fiesta de la Vendimia, how to get there from Tarija, where to eat and practical tips for enjoying one of South America's great wine-tourism destinations.
Valle de la Concepción took hold as Tarija's winemaking center after the Spanish introduced the vine in colonial times and the trade grew from there. Its high-altitude vineyards and its climate gave rise to a tradition of wines and, above all, of singani, the Muscat of Alexandria grape spirit whose denomination of origin is tied to these southern valleys. Through the 20th century, family wineries such as Kohlberg, Aranjuez, Campos de Solana and Casa Real professionalized production and took Tarija's wines and singanis into international competition. Today the valley is the axis of Bolivian wine tourism, with its Fiesta de la Vendimia and its wine route. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The southern department and its wine valleys: chapaca land of temperate climate, cradle of high-altitude wine and singani, a great paleontological site of South American megafauna, setting of the battle of La Tablada and of Moto Méndez, threshold of the Chaco War and home to the country's great gas fields.
Read the history of Tarija →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Few travelers raising a glass of singani in Valle de la Concepción today know that the drink has an origin as improbable as it is fascinating: it was born to solve a logistical problem of the Spanish empire at the Cerro Rico of Potosí. In the mid-16th century, with Potosí silver driving half the world economy, the Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries who came with the conquest pushed for the first vineyards in the south of Upper Peru, in the valleys that are now Tarija and Chuquisaca, looking to supply altar wine and table wine to a mining city growing at a dizzying pace and sitting impossibly far from any port.
According to documents in the Potosí Historical Archive, by 1550 there were already plantings of Muscat of Alexandria —a Mediterranean variety brought over in 1535 along with cuttings from the cellars of Jerez and La Rioja— in the valley of 'Sinkani', in the Nor Lípez province of what is now the department of Potosí. That place name, Sinkani, is pointed to by much of the oral tradition and by several specialist sources as the likely origin of the word 'singani', although the name itself is still debated among historians and sommeliers.
Muscat of Alexandria found in the Tarija valleys —mild, bright and with an extreme temperature swing between day and night— land that seemed made to measure. Valle de la Concepción, thanks to its particular conditions within those valleys, took hold as one of the main centers of this high-altitude viticulture, gathering vineyards and wineries that would in time be planted between 1,700 and 2,400 meters above sea level, among the highest on the planet.
For centuries production was mostly local and artisanal, tied to family wineries that made wine and, above all, a spirit that solved a very practical problem: wine from the southern valleys did not always travel well along the mule tracks to Potosí, but distilled into singani it kept, weighed less and arrived intact. That long tradition laid the foundations of a winemaking culture deeply rooted in the region's identity, which would later make the leap to modern, internationally recognized production.
The most emblematic product born of these valleys is singani, the grape spirit that has become Bolivia's national drink. It is made by distilling wine obtained from Muscat of Alexandria grapes grown in the high-altitude vineyards, which gives it a floral aroma and a character all its own, quite unlike other American grape spirits such as pisco or grappa. Making it in this region goes back to colonial times and has been passed down from one generation to the next; it survived wars, droughts and the end of the very empire that saw it born.
Over time, singani earned recognition as a product with a denomination of origin, tied specifically to certain producing areas in the valleys of southern Bolivia, among them the Tarija valleys where Valle de la Concepción sits. This legal protection acknowledges how much the geographic origin, the grape variety and the production methods matter to the drink's identity and quality, and in practice it means that only spirit made in these specific areas, under defined rules, can be called 'singani'.
Singani is far more than a liquor: it is part of Bolivian culture and sociability, present at national celebrations, weddings and patron saint festivals, and in popular cocktails such as the chuflay (singani with lemon-lime soda, the most ordered combination in any bar in the country) and the yungueñito. Valle de la Concepción, as one of its home territories, is a privileged place to learn how it is made, taste it straight at the distillery and understand its role in Bolivian national identity, something no other country can replicate exactly.
Over the past few decades, Tarija's wine and singani industry has modernized markedly. Alongside the old family and artisanal cellars came the modern plants of the leading Bolivian labels, which bet on better quality, new technology and pushing Tarija's high-altitude wines into the domestic and international markets. Valle de la Concepción ended up at the center of this winemaking revival, which today means the Tarija Valley, the country's most important, accounts for more than 80% of all Bolivian wine production.
Wine tourism arrived hand in hand with that modernization. The wine and singani route, which takes in the valley's wineries with visits, explanations and tastings, turned the region into one of South America's leading wine-tourism destinations, compared even by international specialists to emerging high-altitude regions in other Andean countries. The valley, with its vineyards, its wineries and its gentle climate, became a first-order tourist draw for the department of Tarija, and today it takes in visitors from all over the world curious to try a wine that grows closer to the sky than almost any other on the planet.
The Fiesta de la Vendimia (or Fiesta de la Uva), which celebrates the harvest with tastings, music, dancing and tradition, crowns this wine-tourism calendar every year and reaffirms the bond between the community and its wine culture. During those days the valley fills with Bolivian and foreign visitors, and the traditional treading of the grapes —underfoot, to the rhythm of chapaca coplas— is a reminder that behind the internationally awarded labels there is still a centuries-old peasant tradition. In this way Valle de la Concepción has managed to turn its old farming calling into an experience that combines landscape, history, food and the rich winemaking tradition of the southern Bolivian valleys.
Valle de la Concepción is the seat of the Uriondo municipality, in the Avilés province of the department of Tarija, and its history is bound up with the settlement of the Tarija valleys. After Tarija was founded in 1574 by Luis de Fuentes y Vargas, the nearby valleys —fertile and mild— filled up with estates and hamlets given over to farming, vines and cattle, giving rise to a rural society with a strong identity of its own, very different from that of the cold altiplano that dominates much of Bolivia.
Out of that valley world came chapaca culture, the Tarija way of being, with its music of coplas and erkes, its tonadas, its food (saice, kid goat, chancho a la cruz), its religious devotion and its cheerful, hospitable character, often described as the most 'Andalusian' or Mediterranean in all of Bolivia, perhaps not by chance in the same region where the European vine settled in. Valle de la Concepción, with its church, its square and its traditions, is one of the places where that chapaca identity —tied to the land, to wine and to patron saint festivals— is easiest to breathe in.
The Uriondo municipality is named in tribute to figures from regional history, and over time the valley has combined its farming and winemaking calling with a community life rich in tradition. Understanding the valley is not only about knowing its wineries, but also about this chapaca culture that gives it a soul: the copla sung at harvest time, the wine shared among neighbors and the pride of a regional identity that feels, with reason, different from the rest of the country.
The modern take-off of viticulture in Valle de la Concepción and the Tarija valleys leaned on a few pioneering wineries. Bodegas y Viñedos Kohlberg, founded in 1963 by Julio Kohlberg Chavarría in Santa Ana la Vieja, some 15 kilometers from Tarija, is considered Bolivia's oldest winery at industrial scale and opened the way to technified production; today it farms 147 hectares of French varieties and produces millions of liters of wine a year. In the decades that followed it was joined by houses such as Aranjuez, Campos de Solana and Casa Real —the last of these specializing in singani and now the country's most awarded label— which professionalized production and began competing in international contests.
Over recent decades, Tarija's high-altitude wines —with varieties such as malbec, tannat, cabernet sauvignon and the Muscat of Alexandria used for singani— have won prizes and recognition at competitions in various countries, putting Bolivia on the world wine map, a notable achievement for a country that until a few decades ago appeared in no international wine guide. The collective mark 'Vinos y Singanis de Altura' underlines the region's distinguishing trait: vineyards among the highest on the planet, exceeded in altitude by very few wine regions in the world, such as some recent experiments in Tibet.
That recognition has strengthened local pride and the growth of wine tourism. Today, touring the wineries of Valle de la Concepción —from Campos de Solana and its elegant terrace to Casa Real's Casa del Singani, with its Chiquitano wooden doorway— means watching centuries of artisanal tradition, the one that began in the valley of Sinkani to supply the miners of Potosí, live alongside modern plants that now export to other continents. A valley that has managed to turn four and a half centuries of winemaking history into its greatest tourist draw.